MRE's can kill you PT VIII of VIII

The Air Force is not God

Published on July 12, 2004 By chiprj In Blogging

PT VIII

The last few days went by very quickly and without major incident. We were located near the edge of the ‘box’ (the area inside which the game is played – if you leave the box, you die – I know a very funny Frydaddy story about being placed outside the box during a later trip to JRTC, I’ll have to write that one up later, it’s MUCH shorter than this one). One of the advantages of this was that we weren’t likely to be found by enemy on the ground. We had to stay alert, though, because the enemy airfield was located outside of the box and to conduct operations, they’d fly over our site many times a day. We called in reports all the time and being forewarned of inbound ‘red air’ helped ‘save’ lives during the battles.

We also heard a mortar firing the first night. We called in and it was determined that there were no friendly assets in the area we heard the firing coming from, so a squad was sent in and they captured the enemy team. We actually got feedback about that through our platoon and LT Dan was once again happy with us.

LT Dan was a good guy, but he was funny about some things. There was an incident before we started the exercise. LT Dan was conducting random inspections of soldiers the night before we moved into the box. When he got to me, he decided to check my dummy cord. Dummy cord is used to tie your equipment down to another piece of equipment, so if the regular connector breaks or comes loose, you don’t lose your gear. It’s very helpful. Well, when he checked my bayonet, he asked why it wasn’t dummy corded. I protested that it was. Not only had I dummy corded the scabbard to my belt, but I had also taken a length of dummy cord and secured the bayonet to my belt also. That way, I could use it if necessary, but it couldn’t work it’s way loose and fall out. Well, he wanted the bayonet tied securely into the scabbard so you couldn’t draw it. I told him that it was secure now and if I did what he wanted I wouldn’t be able to use it. He asked what I planned to use it for and I immediately answered, “To kill the enemy, sir!” He said, “Not in this exercise, now secure it properly.” So, I did, for about 18 hours and then went back to doing things my way after that. I ended up using the bayonet a number of times during the exercise (never to kill the enemy) and keeping it tied into the scabbard would have been a pain in the ass.

Only two things really annoyed me during the last few days of the exercise. I had been working with our equipment for a year before this exercise, so I was very good at making it work like it should. The equipment was a bit fussy and sometimes you had to know how to tinker with it to fix the errors it got regularly. Well, I tried to teach P-Ro and Church how to do this, but they were sure that only I had the right touch. So, anytime the equipment got an error, they’d wake me up to fix it. Well, with the recently fixed antenna, we seemed to get errors more often than usual, so my sleep was always being interrupted and they never bothered to learn how to fix it themselves. Sometimes, it only took shutting the system down and turning it back on. Sometimes, I’d get up and see the antenna was leaning a little from the wind. I’d tighten the lines up and it would work again. LIKE MAGIC…

The other thing was after a short time where P-Ro was in a state of “Oh, my God, we almost died…” shock, he entered an annoying period of where he was convinced we were invulnerable. He literally started working on a “team symbol” that included looked like the air assault wings badge, except it had bat wings and a lightening bolt (a symbol sometimes associated with our line of work and also the symbol of our unit). He had also worked out a phrase to add to the symbol “God took his best shot”. Just to annoy him, I would tell him every chance I got, that it wasn’t God, but the Air Force that had taken a shot. He later changed it to some latin phrase that translated to “Fortune Favors the Strong”. I told him that fortune must not like him because he couldn’t lift my ruck. He didn’t like that much either.

The exercise finally ended and we got a truck ride back to our platoon. We sat around the first night, eating hot chow and trading stories about all the things that happened to all the teams. I got to see MC-Call, the friend that dimed me out on the radio the night I fell asleep. I gave him some crap, he gave me some crap and we laughed. By this time, the entire company had heard one version or another of the story about the pallet of MRE’s and everybody wanted to hear it from us. I remember having the entire platoon and people from the other platoons surrounding us, listening to me tell the story of what happened. After than night, the rest of the team would decline any invitation to tell the story. They would tell the inquiring person that they couldn’t do it justice. They would leave it to me. Now as anyone that knows me (and anyone that’s made it all the way to here without giving up) will tell you, I love to talk. I love to tell stories. So, I took every opportunity to tell it. Happily. Many of times. I still tell it today. I’ve actually met people for the first time and had them ask me to tell them the story. They’d heard that I tell it better than anyone and just had to hear it from me.

So, that’s it. Many parts. I hope that if you made it all the way through, you’ll give me some feedback and tell me what you think. Like I said, it’s much better to hear it from me in person, but I’d like to know how it was in writing. If I get a good response, I’ll write some more. As greywar Link once said, I have a years worth of stories. Thanks for reading.

Comments

greywar

on Jul 12, 2004

Nice to see it in print for a change:) P-ro was not right most of the time even *before* he turned psycho on us in Korea.

citahellion

on Jul 12, 2004

Pretty good story, Chiprj....

CS Guy

on Jul 12, 2004

Great story.

pseudosoldier

on Jul 12, 2004

Good deal. I wish I had some field stories. I went to the field, once... my wife has more field stories than I (having been to NTC once). Maybe I can get her permission for those...

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